CCS Leeds Ltd provides leased lines, ethernet first mile (EFM),hosting services, VoIP telephone lines, technical support and a wide range of other services. We are also human beings and this blog is a regular account of who we are and the kind of thing we deal with on a daily basis.......

Thursday, 10 May 2012

How Can a Leased Line Save me Money?

Simple – run your telephony over it.

Yes, it’s a simple answer to a simple question but I guess
if you’re reading this article, you want to know a little more, rather than
just taking my word for it?

The key components of this discussion are reliability, speed
and what we call the service level agreement. Until recent times, internet
connections have not always been fast or reliable enough to support a stable
voice platform.

A service level agreement is a contractual obligation on the
supplier of a service, to fix the service in a guaranteed time frame, in the
event of an outage. If the service level agreement is not met, then there is
often a financial penalty on the supplier, so it really is in their best
interests to get on with fixing the broken service.

So, where I am leading with this is simple - traditional
digital telephone lines have a service level agreement. ADSL and standard
broadband connections do not. Therefore it may not make sense to run large voice network over standard ADSL services as it would not in theory be reliable
enough. However, an internet leased line or EFM do have a service level
agreement which is the same, or at least very similar to that of a digital
phone line service, so therefore it makes perfect sense to get rid of any
traditional phone line services and run them over the internet connection
instead.

As an example, let’s make up a scenario…… ABC Widgets Ltd
runs a call centre selling their products over the telephone and they have 30
channels of ISDN30 (that means 30 traditional voice channels). Each channel
costs them £12 per month which means that in a year they pay £4,320 for the
line rental alone. They also have a bonded ADSL internet service which costs
them £125 per month (this includes the analogue phone line rental, ADSL service
and the bonding package). So in total
they currently pay £5,820 per annum for their phone lines and internet
connectivity combined. They also pay an annual maintenance charge for their
onsite telephony hardware which costs them £800 per annum which now takes the
cost up to £6,620 per annum, and this is before they have even made one phone
call.

Now, as ABC Widgets Ltd is very near to their local
telephone exchange which is enabled for EFM, they can achieve uncontended
download and upload speeds of 14Mbp/s. The amount of data used for 30 channels
of voice equates to 2Mb. This means that if they ran their voice over the new
EFM line, then they would still have a whopping 12Mbp/s for internet and email
traffic. The cost for this EFM service would cost them £3,800 per annum and on
top of that they would need to rent the internet voice channels at £2 per
channel per month, which means that their overall cost of telephony and
internet would be £4,520.

This means that by migrating to a faster internet
connection, ABC Widgets Ltd would save themselves £2,100 per annum.

It is also worth bearing in mind that call rates over the
internet are far cheaper than on traditional ISDN lines as there are far less
overheads and running costs.

In conclusion I think it is fair to say that the above
example illustrates how a company can save money on their communication costs
by moving to a faster and more reliable internet connection with the same
service level agreement as what they are used to with their old, traditional
telephony services.

CCS (Leeds) Ltd prides itself on giving honest, accurate and
thorough advice so please get in touch if you would like to know more about any
of the services that we have to offer.